In general, people using a mobile telephone or a tablet computer to book a seat have difficulty using online seatmaps. A seatmap may be thought of as an interactive online representation of the real world and might symbolise the seats in a cinema, theatre, stadium, or seats on an aeroplane or train.
Online seatmaps have existed for many years but they were not designed for mobile devices; they were designed for use with desktop computers, which, in general, have a large display, a keyboard and a mouse. Such a seatmap is shown in FIG. 1a of the drawings.
As will be appreciated, using a desktop computer equipped with large screen and mouse, it is very easy to select a seat by hovering over circle representing the seat with a mouse and clicking the red circle. The same webpage viewed on a mobile device is very difficult to use, as can be seen in the left hand drawing of FIG. 1b of the drawings. The user has to zoom in an enormous amount in order to select a seat. It is hard, using a finger rather than a mouse, to select the required seat rather than any of the others surrounding it, and this is illustrated in FIG. 1b. As can be seen in the right hand drawing of FIG. 1b, having zoomed in, the row-numbers are no longer visible. This is because the JavaScript is overlaying the header and this further reduces the available screen size.
Some service providers have attempted to overcome this by creating a separate mobile website. In such solutions, the website recognises that a mobile device is being used and switches the device to an entirely different website. This approach works but it is very expensive for the service provider to maintain multiple websites.
Other service providers offer a mobile application, which customers can download, install and then use to select seats and book tickets. Again, this works but it is expensive to maintain, difficult to support all mobile and tablet devices and it is off putting to customers who, rather than installing an application might visit a competitor's website instead.